The Economist has a great obituary for "Robert Francis Boyle, art director for Alfred Hitchcock, died on August 1st, aged 100."
"The job of art director was then new in cinema. Before the 1930s movies needed little more than a theatre prop-and-set man, but now they were acquiring a ‘reality’ of their own that called for a look and a mood. Mr Boyle’s job, in his words, was to control the space in which the film was set. He had to infuse the emotional and psychological requirements of the screenplay into buildings, landscapes, rooms. Ruts in a road, clutter in a house, the paint on a wall, would evoke layers of living and feeling over the years. He had to present all this as real and then, by subtle placing of objects and use of light, draw viewers to see the scene as the director wished them to.
Most directors gave him merely a script and an outline. He worked for many over the years, on films ranging from ‘Cape Fear’ to ‘Abbott and Costello go to Mars’, but it was Hitchcock, he said, who taught him what he knew. At their first meeting in 1941 he found him at his desk making drawings on a little scroll of paper, and was invited, awestruck as he was, to sit down opposite and do the same. It seemed to be a sort of test. Hitchcock, who already held every shot in his head, drew stick men, all to proper image size, and Mr Boyle understood that his job was to give the story an atmosphere that would seem to wrap the figures round, be part of them, and contain their histories, as a small child could make a stick man represent all he felt and knew about mother, brother or friend."
The New York Times had on obit for him too, Robert F. Boyle, Film Designer for Hitchcock, Dies at 100
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